This edited book serves as a companion volume to the Seventh INFORMS
Telecommunications Conference held in Boca Raton, Florida, March 7-10,
2004. The 18 papers in this book were carefully selected after a
thorough re- view process. The research presented within these articles
focuses on the latest methodological developments in three key
areas--pricing of telecommunica- tions services, network design, and
resource allocation--that are most relevant to current
telecommunications planning. With the global deregulation of the
telecommunications industry, effective pricing and revenue management,
as well as an understanding of competi- tive pressures are key factors
that will improve revenue in telecommunica- tions companies. Chapters
1-5 address these topics by focusing on pricing of telecommunications
services. They present some novel ideas related to pricing (including
auction-based pricing of network bandwidth) and modeling compe- tition
in the industry. The successful telecommunications companies of the
future will likely be the ones that can minimize their costs while
meeting customer expectations. In this context the optimal
design/provisioning of telecommunication networks plays an important
role. Chapters 6-12 address these topics by focusing on net- work design
for a wide range of technologies including SONET, SDH, WDM, and MPLS.
They include the latest research developments related to the mod- eling
and solving of network design problems. Day-to-day management/control of
telecommunications networks is depen- dent upon the optimal allocation
of resources. Chapters 13-18 provide insight- ful solutions to several
intriguing resource allocation problems.
